Ecological divergence of burying beetles into the forest canopy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Closely related species with overlapping geographic ranges encounter a significant challenge: they share many ecological traits and preferences but must partition resources to coexist. In Ontario, potentially eleven species of carrion beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae) live together and require vertebrate carrion for reproduction. Their reliance on an ephemeral and uncommon resource that is unpredictable in space and time is thought to create intense intra- and interspecific competition. Evidence suggests that burying beetle species reduce competition by partitioning carrion for breeding across different habitats, temperatures, and seasons. Here, we test predictions of an alternative axis for partitioning carrion: vertical partitioning between the ground and forest canopy. We conducted a survey of carrion beetles from May to July 2016 at the Queen’s University Biological Station across 50 randomly generated points using baited lethal traps at zero and six metres. Ground traps yielded more species and individuals compared to those in the canopy, and the number of individuals and species caught increased through the season in both trap types. Ground and canopy traps were accurately distinguished by the presence or absence of three species: ground traps contained more Nicrophorus orbicollis and Necrophila americana , while canopy traps contained more Nicrophorus pustulatus . We trapped 253 N. pustulatus in the canopy, but only 60 on the ground. N. pustulatus is thought to be rare across its geographic range, but our results suggest it is uniquely common in canopy habitats, demonstrating a vertical partitioning of habitat and resources. Our results are consistent with N. pustulatus having diverged into canopy habitats as a strategy to coexist with closely related sympatric species when competing for similar resources. We still, however, do not know the traits that allow N. pustulatus to flourish in the canopy, exactly how N. pustulatus uses canopy resources for breeding, or the factors that restrict the expansion of other burying beetles into this habitat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".